New Frontiers of Cooperation in the Economy

In this paper I study the role of social capital in a just society. In such a world, the most fruitful first step in considering communities as economic institutions isn’t to ask what social capital might be, but to ask instead a fundamental question facing any group of people who have agreed on a joint course of action: under what contexts can the members be sanguine that the promises they have made to one another are credible? I show that answering the question leads us to a tight and useable notion of social capital in a just world.